The spoken word: A BBC guide. This item is unavailable.The spoken word: A BBC guide

40 pages. Cover fadedThe British Broadcasting Corporation, which takes very seriously the task of teaching the English how to speak, has just published this guide to pronunciatio n, diction and grammar. Written by no less an authority than Robert Burchfield, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, it is often surprisingly lenien t. Citing a sentence of Graham Greene?s as a precedent, Burchfield declines to f orbid absolutely the use of ??like?? as a conjunction. The BBC reports, for exam ple, that the error of confusing ??disinterested?? with ??uninterested?? ??attra cts more unfavorable comment from listeners than any other word, with the possib le exception of ?hopefully.? ?? But Burchfield does not pander to the public. Th e use of ??alternative?? to mean one of several possibilities, instead of simply one of two, is ??vigorously resisted by listeners but impossible to avoid in ma ny contexts,?? he says. On the other hand, he is vigorous and definite in his co ndemnation of such clichs as ??scenario,?? ??at this point in time?? and ??no wa y,?? Americanisms, he says, that have crept into English speech. But throughout it all, he takes a soothingly long historical view of the evolution of language, noting that it has survived other disruptions considerably more serious than wh atever may be happening to it now. As examples, he cites the loss of grammatical gender in Early Middle English and the great vowel shift at the beginning of th e 15th century, when nearly every vowel changed (??hoose?? became ??house,?? and ??gose?? became ??goose??). Reassuringly, he concludes, ??Any argument based on the assumption that the changes occurring in the English language in Great Brit ain at present are more serious or more objectionable than those that have occur.…